Experts stumped by ancient Jerusalem markings

AP, JERUSALEM

Mysterious stone carvings made thousands of years ago and recently uncovered in an excavation underneath Jerusalem have archeologists stumped.

Israeli diggers who uncovered a complex of rooms carved into the bedrock in the oldest section of the city recently found the markings: Three “V” shapes cut next to each other into the limestone floor of one of the rooms, about 5cm deep and 50cm long. There were no finds to offer any clues pointing to the identity of who made them or what purpose they served.

The archeologists in charge of the dig know so little that they have been unable even to posit a theory about their nature, said Eli Shukron, one of the two directors of the dig.

“The markings are very strange, and very intriguing. I’ve never seen anything like them,” Shukron said.

The shapes were found in a dig known as the City of David, a politically sensitive excavation conducted by Israeli government archeologists and funded by a nationalist Jewish group under the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan in east Jerusalem. The rooms were unearthed as part of the excavation of fortifications around the ancient city’s only natural water source, the Gihon spring.

It is possible, the dig’s archeologists said, that when the markings were made at least 2,800 years ago the shapes might have accommodated some kind of wooden structure that stood inside them, or they might have served some other purpose on their own. They might have had a ritual function or one that was entirely mundane. Archeologists faced by a curious artifact can usually at least venture a guess about its nature, but in this case no one, including outside experts consulted by Shukron and the dig’s co-director, archeologists with decades of experience between them, has any idea.

There appears to be at least one other ancient marking of the same type at the site. A century-old map of an expedition led by the British explorer Montague Parker, who searched for the lost treasures of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem between 1909 and 1911, includes the shape of a “V” drawn in an underground channel not far away. Modern archeologists haven’t excavated that area yet.

Ceramic shards found in the rooms indicate they were last used in about 800BC, with Jerusalem under the rule of Judean kings, the dig’s archeologists say. At about that time, the rooms appear to have been filled with rubble to support the construction of a defensive wall.

However, it is unclear whether they were built in the time of those kings or centuries earlier by the Canaanite residents who predated them.

The purpose of the complex is part of the riddle. The straight lines of its walls and level floors are evidence of careful engineering, and it was located close to the most important site in the city, the spring, suggesting it might have had an important function.

A unique find in a room beside the one with the markings — a stone like a modern grave marker, which was left upright when the room was filled in — might offer a clue. Such stones were used in the ancient Middle East as a focal point for ritual or a memorial for dead ancestors, the archeologists said, and it is likely a remnant of the pagan religions that the city’s Israelite prophets tried to eradicate. It is the first such stone to be found intact in Jerusalem excavations.

However, the ritual stone does not necessarily mean the whole complex was a temple. It might simply have marked a corner devoted to religious practice in a building whose purpose was commonplace.